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Edit iCal Event Titles Directly

In the Leopard version of iCal, double-clicking an event shows a summary of the event, and to edit the name (or anything else), you must click the Edit button in the summary pop-up. To bypass the summary and edit pop-ups entirely, Option-double-click the event name. That selects the text for editing, and you can make any changes you want. Click outside the event to save your changes.

Why iWork Had to Change (and What That Has to Do with Aperture)

I can hear you thinking (yes, I can do that), “What does Aperture or iPhoto have to do with iWork?” Here’s what: once again, I’m seeing comments pop up in various places asserting that Apple’s goal when it reworks its software is either the deliberate “iOS-ification” of the software, or deliberately “dumbing it down.” Right after the Aperture/iPhoto news broke, in fact, I saw one commenter (no link, because I don’t want to embarrass the person) write that the replacement of Aperture by the yet-to-be-released Photos app is just like what Apple did when it (purportedly) replaced Pages on the Mac with the iOS version.

Yes, that is what the commenter claimed happened last October with iWork. That’s flat out wrong, of course: Apple did no such thing with Pages, nor with the rest of iWork, and I’m pretty sure that Apple won’t be doing that with Aperture.

Now, I won’t deny that each of the iWork apps lost a lot of features when their new versions were released last October. But after studying one, Pages (after all, I am writing “Take Control of Pages”), I can declare that Apple has not deliberately “dumbed down” Pages, nor has the Mac version undergone “iOS-ification” (whatever that is supposed to mean anyway). What Apple has done is to ensure document integrity when a Pages document travels from Mac to iOS and back. Providing that integrity is what made the iWork reboot necessary, and something like that is what is behind the transition from Aperture (and iPhoto) to Photos.

Let’s think back to how things worked with iWork last September. Suppose you created a Pages document on your Mac and saved it in iCloud as Apple encouraged you to do. Then you opened the document on your iPad, and you saw, to your disappointment, that some fonts had changed and that layouts had shifted. So you sighed and went back to your Mac and opened the document with Pages there, and you discovered — now, to your horror — that the changes you saw on your iPad had carried over to the Mac. Then you said a few words that I won’t repeat here.

The true “dumbing down” was what happened to iWork documents as they traveled across platforms.

This doesn’t happen with the new iWork apps. Over the past few months, I’ve flung Pages documents from my Mac, to my browser, to my iPhone, to my iPad, and back to my Mac, and never once saw a layout shift or a font get changed as a result of the document’s peregrinations. To be sure, if I use a font on the Mac that iOS doesn’t provide, the document does look different in iOS: that’s because Pages for iOS provides a substitute font for display purposes. But the iOS app also remembers the font I originally used, and when the document gets back to my Mac, that font shows up again right where it belongs. (In my few experiments with the other iWork apps, Numbers and Keynote, I saw similar examples of document
integrity being preserved as I moved documents between platforms.)

So much for dumbing down. Now what about iOS-ification?

As I said, I’m not quite sure I know what that term even means, but I think it might mean that the apps all look alike and act alike, whether on an iOS device or a Mac. If so, that’s certainly not true of Pages, or of the other iWork apps, and I don’t think that is what is going to happen with Photos either.

First of all, the apps don’t look alike; in the case of Pages, I have hundreds of screenshots that prove just the opposite. Yes, there are some similarities. For example, the default guide colors in Pages for Mac and Pages for iOS are the same. And, yes, that is a trivial example: I chose it because most of the examples of iOS-ified appearance in the Mac app are trivial. The similarities between the Mac iWork apps and their iOS counterparts are skin-deep, designed to create a family resemblance between the Mac and iOS apps.

I’m fine with that because, regardless of their superficial similarities, each of the apps works the way you expect it to work on its respective platform. For instance, on the Mac, you can position an object precisely on the page in a Pages document by entering coordinates in the Format Inspector, whereas on an iPad you use multi-touch finger gestures to move objects precisely. You get the same result, but you do it in quite different ways; the apps don’t act alike.

Nor do the Mac and iOS apps provide identical capabilities: the Mac Pages app provides a lot more functionality than the iOS app. Take styles, for instance: you can apply paragraph, character, or list styles in either app, but you can create new styles only on the Mac. There are dozens of places in my Pages book where I point out that one feature or another is only available on the Mac.

So much for iOS-ification. That’s not what’s going on with the Mac apps either.

What is going on, as I said, is that Apple is making sure that the documents handled by its apps on any of its platforms retain their integrity. This means that opening up a Keynote presentation on an iPad won’t discard carefully applied transitions because of a missing animation, or that opening a Pages document on an iPhone won’t permanently blow out your document’s layout because a font is missing.

To achieve this, Apple rebuilt the iWork apps from the ground up. In the process, some features in all the iWork apps were lost (though in fact, Apple promised to restore many of the missing features over time and has begun to do so). Apple is likely doing something similar with Photos, developing data and metadata implementations that can work efficiently for images across all the platforms that Apple supports. Some features will almost certainly be lost. And some of them will come back later, along with new features. (For a more detailed analysis of what is going on with Aperture, see Jeff Carlson’s “Aperture’s Golden Hour,” 2 July
2014.)

Behind all of this re-engineering, of course, is iCloud. As Tim Cook pointed out more than two years ago, iCloud is “not just a product, it’s a strategy for the next decade.” Apple imagines an ideal customer who has several different Apple devices (or, better yet, all the devices), and who freely bounces documents between them, with iCloud transparently managing the handoffs. As I pointed out in “iCloud: The Anti-Social Network,” 6 February 2014, Apple sees iCloud as a digital hub that connects your Apple devices, allowing seamless access to your information from any device. But unless the
apps on all of Apple’s platforms can provide a good user experience and not damage the data in the process, the iCloud digital hub would be almost useless.

And that’s exactly what Apple is doing with iWork: making sure that when you store an iWork document in iCloud, you won’t damage it no matter the device you open it on. The previous generation of iWork apps was not designed for a seamless, cross-device, cloud-managed experience — how could they be? There was no App store when they were in development, nor was there an iPad, and iCloud was something called MobileMe (about which the less said the better). For Apple to provide a seamless, cross-device, cloud-managed experience, it had to build its apps with that experience in mind — patching old code just won’t cut it.

So what’s behind Apple’s rebooting of iWork, and what’s driving the move from iPhoto and Aperture to Photos? I think the answer is clearly cloudy.

Check out the Take Control ebooks that expand on the topic in this article:

Work effectively in Apple's Pages word processor with essential guidance from author Michael E. Cohen. You'll learn the best ways to create short and long documents, master the layout tools, and deal with compatibility issues, whether you want to work in Pages 5 for OS X 10.10 Yosemite on the Mac, Pages 2 for iOS 8, Pages for iCloud, or a combination of those apps.

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Comments about Why iWork Had to Change (and What That Has to Do with Aperture)(Comments are closed.)

Thanks, that was helpful. But I'm very concerned about the new Photos app. At least one of my clients has masses of photos (around 150Gb) which she clearly doesn't want all to be in the cloud. Will it be like Mail, in that you can store some in a sort of IMAP, and the rest on the local machine? Or am I going to have to store the other photos in another app, like Picasa?

It seems almost unthinkable that they would force all photos to be stored on iCloud. But there are other examples of Apple assuming everyone has infinitely fast Internet connections (e.g. installing GarageBand on multiple computers requires downloading many gigabytes for each) so I guess there's a small chance. With my rural DSL Internet connection that would make it unusable for me. It would make it unusable for a lot of people besides me and for a lot of different reasons, though, so I'm remaining optimistic.

iMovie 10 for OS X and Final Cut Pro X share the same core with alternate user interfaces for different users.

The interesting development will come when iMovie on an iPad will be able to edit a Final Cut Pro library shared via iCloud.

Metal will allow Apple to implement their Motion app for newer iOS devices. Why? Because there's a copy of Motion built into Final Cut and iMovie for OS X. It is there to do clip compositing and effects.

Why run Final Cut on an iPad - because a Continuity feature will be to make simple changes in iOS before going on to make changes in OS X later.

Apple has crippled iWork a lot. There are no more layout documents in Pages. The new iWork should have been named iWork light. In many aspects it's much worse than the old AppleWorks. Apple has a long tradition to radically stop legacy support. One needs to have old computers to ensure access to old documents. Very bad style.

Maybe, but several other features are gone, e. g. import of AppleWorks documents. iWork never became a true successor of AppleWorks. Pages 4.6 in some aspects is still behind it. And there is no database, no drawing. Worst of all, the file format is not documented. One can't easily write replacements. Legacy support by Apple is very bad.

True: Apple has never made legacy support a priority, and I have been bitten on more than one occasion by that lack of support. This unfortunate Apple habit does not make me happy; see, for example, "Rosetta and Lion: Get Over It?," 23 May 2011 — http://tidbits.com/article/12191 —

However, as I have just spent more than a week documenting the drawing capabilities of Pages 5, I must disagree with your assertion that Pages has no drawing—in the Mac app, at least: just click the Shape icon on the toolbar and then click Draw with Pen, or, alternately, choose Insert > Line > Draw with Pen.

Agreed. The latest version of Pages has 628 ratings in the App store, and more than half give it one star out of 5. Pages 4 met the needs of vastly more users than Pages 5 does. Those users are either staying with Pages 4 or migrating to LibreOffice or Nisus.

Definitely! There was absolutely no reason to dumb down iWork Mac to make it appear "seamless" with iWork iOS. A more competent job would have been to "smarten up" iWork iOS so it would work with the ORIGINAL iWork: iWork Mac. But it seems the GOOD Mac OS programmers have left the building, and all that is left are the "wannabes" who started out programing iOS. Along with the "iOS0zation" of Mac OS, Apple is slowly turning the Mac into non-upgradable platforms as shown by the release of the first new iMacs which can't even have the RAM upgraded (unless you pay Apple's extortion price). With the vast improvements Windows has made (8.1 looks to be the best yet) it is time to consider it as an alternative after 30-plus years with Apple.

I did that - thinking that the layout would change ... but it removed the 'document box' that contained all the text - GONE. No option to save a copy. I closed without saving - TOO LATE. Now I am hunting for an older copy 'somewhere' on my backups. Trying to stay in P09 and experiment with Pages 5. Not comfortable with it.

I am not a power use. Very average I would say - I use my Mac for browsing the internet, Facebook, email, using iTunes for my music, using iPhoto to manage my photos. Occasionally I will use one of the iWork apps - lately mostly Pages. When I got Mavericks a Pages update was prompted, for version 5.0 which I promptly downloaded thinking it was an "upgrade" to version 4.3 which I had been using. Thankfully this "upgrade" didn't delete my version 4.3, because later on I went and read the comments from all the prior 5.0 version users of Pages that had suddenly had an app that wouldn't do most of the, admitidly, power user things that they were used to from the software, and therefore had a dumbed-down application. Apple says they are adding again features. Will those power users get all their tools back in future updates? What happens when Pages 4.3 is finally unsupported. My fear is that Apple will do this with Photo, give us an app that doesn't have the power of it's replacement.

My only disagreement with what you say is the phrase "dumbed down", which implies that Apple has deliberately removed features to make the app more appealing to the less intelligent or sophisticated. That is not what is happening. "Less capable" is more accurate, and the reason is because the app has been rebuilt from the ground up and a lot of features are missing simply because they weren't a top priority for the initial releases.

There are, in fact, some surprisingly non-"dumb" (that is, power-user) features in Pages 5. That they aren't the same features as the ones that are currently missing is a separate issue.

I no longer use Pages. I produce weekly large files (this week over 800 pages) consisting of research and articles. I depended on bookmarks to be able to easily access all that material. No longer. And the app just wants to control everything like Word does.

I have left Pages behind and am a very happy user of Nisus Writer Pro. But in order to access previous documents (they are sermon research, added to every 3 years via the lectionary cycle) I have to open in Pages, export in Word, open in Word and copy past to Nisus in order to preserve the bookmarks. Something is horribly wrong here.

While I understand what you are saying about Pages, I cannot help but feel it is a "dumbing down" action - the program has lost its power in significant ways.

The loss of Appleworks support. The inability to save or open RTF's (to send files to others). The loss of the bookmarks. All of these are valuable resources for one who uses a word processor for heavy work.

The book is already available as a pre-book, and, when you buy it, you get a free update each time I add new material. It has already received four updates since its initial release, and I expect to have a new update ready shortly.

Yes. But not in any way you'd like: Pages 5 doesn't offer any outlining mode whatsoever.

However, if you are looking to make hierarchical lists, Pages 5 does offer very powerful list styles which include hierarchical and tiered numbers, but no outlining mode where you can collapse or expand an outline into a document.

If you really want a writing tool (not a publishing tool) that offers robust outlining and planning capabilities, and that lets you look at your document as text, outline, or note cards, I suggest you look at Scrivener.

I appreciate your perspective AND I empathize with people with large photo collections and sophisticated graphic arts needs. We are a giclee shop and have a huge collection of images, mostly artwork scans and photos, all of which we edit for color accuracy in printing. We chose Aperture over Adobe LightRoom because of our commitment to Mac products. iPhoto is so limited compared with Aperture, it is hard to imagine that a merging of the two is going to provide the same support for professional graphics that Aperture does. Are core features of Aperture needed by graphic arts professionals going to be made available to novice photographers mostly interested in social networking? These seem like hugely different audiences. Apple has made a point of trying to compete with LighRoom. Is that posture going to continue? Is Aperture leaving commitment to professional image management behind?

Mike, I'm a pro photographer and I've used Aperture since early beta. I am comfortable enough, plus there's no viable alternative, so I'll wait and see what Photos is like. I also think it will be a real winner for consumers and prosumers. That said however I will not be using iCloud and I have no intention of doing ANY content creation with iOS. I use an iPhones and iPads extensively, on a daily basis, but only for content viewing, email, etc. time will tell, but I'm not thrilled.

If one of the features they remove in the transition from iPhoto to Photos is facial recognition, I'm all for that. Talk about a huge time waster. The least they could do is provide an option to turn it off.

This article is an exercise in moving the goalposts. It argues that iWorks hasn't been "dumbed down," it's only "lost features" (a semantic distinction at best) for the sake of document integrity with the iOS version.

So okay, document integrity may be a nice thing, but this leaves me with a couple of obvious questions. 1) Why is it inconsistent with a robust feature set? 2) If for some reason that trade-off *is* necessary, why is Apple confident that more users want cross-device consistency than want robust features?

I like my iPhone, but as others have noted, it's a device for viewing content, not creating it. And if Apple's strategy is built around getting us to put everything in the cloud, well, sorry, but I prefer that my documents live on my own hardware.

Frankly, there's a trend the last few years. It's not just iWorks. iTunes 11 was NOT an improvement on 10.7. iPhoto 9.5 was NOT an upgrade. iMovie 8 was NOT an upgrade. Even OSX has been downhill since 10.6. It's disturbing.

1) Cross-device data integrity is not inconsistent with a robust feature set. But developing a robust feature set does take time. The latest iWork apps are all brand-new apps; they may share the names of their predecessors, but they are not built on the same code base, nor do they use the same data architecture. For that matter, while iWork apps may be missing a number of features from previous versions, they do have some powerful features. Take a look at what you can do tables and charts, or lines and shapes, for example, in Pages 5—fully functional spreadsheets and complex interactive charts within a word processing document are hardly features aimed at novices, nor are vector graphics with bezier curves.

2) What makes Apple confident that users want more cross-device consistency in their apps? The number of devices sold and currently in use: several hundred million iOS users vs. fewer than 80 million Mac users. These days it is far more likely for people to come to the Mac from iOS than the other way around.

Personally, I'm disappointed at the absence of some very useful features in the new iWork apps. But I also understand what Apple is attempting to do with those apps and am interested in seeing how they will evolve. Meanwhile, I have other apps, from other vendors, that I can use on my Mac, apps that DO have the features that I need.

Historically, Apple has never used its apps to corner the market for any particular software niche, but to do two things: 1) to demonstrate and promote the capabilities of its hardware and OS technologies, and 2) to provide new Apple users with devices they can use immediately right out of the box. With the latest iWork, Apple is continuing that tradition.

Mike, I believe your statement in 2) is spacious. We all know that an extremely high percentage of Smartphone users simply use them as a phone... especially Android-based phones. I suspect a very large number of iPhones are in use with little more than the apps they came with. Furthermore, most of these apps never get used. I suspect many don't even get updated. As you say, the huge success of the iPhone has brought in an enormous number of new users... users with little or no experience with Smartphones or computers for that matter. They may add a few games, but they are hardly power users.To them it's just a cell phone. To me, Apple is hell bent on developing complete cross-platform compatibility for an audience that, for the most part, couldn't care less.

I disagree. Aperture was already falling way behind Lightroom in features to the point I was strongly considering my some 120,000 images to Lightroom. This type of app has moved from being a image management tool to being where most image manipulation occurs without using Photoshop which has a destructive workflow. Lightroom has continued to add features like lens correction and layers while Aperture and IPhoto haven't added much except being able use eithers library. Aperture in my opinion is a much better image management tool but a much worst image manipulation tool. I can't see the new photo being better in either functional area. And all these articles saying the lost functionality will be covered by 3rd parties I "what the heck". They already do. I use perfectphoto and NIK plugins for aperture, Lightroom, photoshop etc so this us already here. I'm not happy with Apple and I think all photographers should push hard on Apple. The real agenda is to sell us on cloud storage at a $.

My frustration is going from a single file to the package format, which is VERY easily corrupted in a 10.9 server environment. I consider the current iWork to not be usable in many environments, which is tragic.

Pages 5.2 is severely dumbed down [110 missing features, many crucial, and a never ending string of bugs].

The iOSification refers to the SHIFT from the Mac UI to a much more iOS UI. The fact that Apple hasn't gone 100% of the way to iOS is no plus. If they had at least it would be consistent . It isn't.

So now you have how many UIs?

The previous version/s which have the merit of running on all platforms, although Apple made it impossible on iOS 7 to maintain formats and synch and multiple v5s.

iWork for iCloud is a thorough kludge and deserves its beta moniker. The only place Apple was honest with its users. All the other versions it was not honest just how many problems there were with the launched version and all the many (incompatible) upgrades since.

The multiple versions with their shifting formatting as you go from one to another, dual install on Macs and bad Export to Word and PDF are an ongoing pain and never ending confusion for users.

What competent programmers launch a completely new set of applications, mostly auto installed and don't tell users:

That it damages their files then automatically saves over them?

Installs parallel copies of the applications which users frustratingly open alternately to enormous confusion?

Knowingly has an enormous number of features missing, therefore the cut-down templates, but doesn't tell the users.

Has duplicate parts of the UI still floating around

Has a long list of serious bugs that they haven't even done basic checking for.

Just by sweeping through the UI, took me an hour and a bit, I discovered a great majority of these on first opening. That suggests they hadn't done this elementary testing. Much of the rest also strongly suggests that the last thing they had on their mind was the users and the consequences to their work.

Apple support was still misreporting what happened months after the event which shows they had no better idea than the users what had happened.

If you had the previous version of Pages on your Mac when you installed Pages 5, you still have it unless you manually deleted it; installing Pages 5 does not remove any of the iWork ’09 apps. The older version of Pages should be in your Applications folder, inside the iWork '09 folder. Just launch it like you would any other app.

Thanks for the help. I am using a new computer but found the Pages from my backup disk of my former computer had a copy and brought it over. Now I can successfully open years of Pages documents without fear of lost data. Many thanks.

Speaking of opening old Pages documents, does anyone know of a way to search the disk for Pages documents that are too old for Pages 5 to open? I don't want to be out of luck someday when Pages '09 isn't compatible with the latest OS X and I need to open a document that I haven't opened in a long time.